Walking the Shelves -- A Basic Genealogical Tool

Libraries have books and books have information about your ancestors. In our mad rush to get online and use all the resources, it is grounding to remember that we have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in books. Current copyright laws around the world severely limit newer books from being generally available through digital copies online. Fortunately, there are still a few people out there who are publishing valuable genealogical records in paper book format. To access these newer published records we have three options:

• We can buy the book from a publisher or supplier
• We can try to find a digital copy of the book available
• We can try to find the book in a library

I also need to mention that there is a lot of information available on CDs and microformats such as microfilm and microfiche, but I am focusing here on books. 

Some of us end up buying a lot of books. I have been trying to give my book collection away to my children for several years, but they all have huge collections and really don't want to add in all my books also. Despite resolutions to avoid buying any new books, we seem to add new ones at an alarming rate. But there is a limit. Some books are wonderful for reference, but I really don't need my own copy. If I can't find a digital copy, I start looking in libraries. Fortunately, I live very close to the huge Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library and reasonably close to the Salt Lake City Family History Library. Between those two libraries, I can find almost any book I can identify that I need and is not available in digital format. 

Here is an example of a book I discovered and could not find online:

Watson, Judith Green. South Kingstown, Rhode Island Tax Lists, 1730-1799. Rockland, Me.: Picton Press, 2007.

I did find that the book was in digital format, but it was only available from the HathiTrust.org in a university library. Unfortunately, my access to the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library does not include access to digital books from the HathiTrust.org. So I had to look for a paper copy. Fortunately, the BYU Lee Library catalog showed that they had a paper copy. 

So, I went to the Social Sciences section of the Lee Library and started looking. I ended up crawling on the floor, looking book by book at the books in the section where the book was supposed to be because it was on the bottom shelf. Meanwhile, I began to see other interesting books that might help my research. This is commonly called "walking the shelves" and it is the ultimate way of doing research in any library. Catalogs are great. Looking in WorldCat.org is great. But there is no substitute for walking the shelves. 

This past week I spent a day in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and during almost the entire time I was there, I walked the shelves. I simply look at every single book on the shelves and pull off every book that might be of some possible interest. I then go through the books and see if they are relevant. Using this method of searching, I foud the exact information I was looking for. When I went into the Family History Library, I had no idea if what I was looking for was even available, but I found the exact information, this time a will abstract, that opened up the research I was doing at the time. 

When I write about "walking the shelves," I am referring to this process of pulling every single book off of the library shelves and examining its contents. I may seem slow, but it is ultimately the most efficient way to find what you are looking for and a lot of things that you did not expect to find. Oh, I first became aware of the Tax book cited above by walking the shelves in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. 

The Digital Race for Genealogy Books and Records

As genealogists, we are all winners in the race to digitize all the world's records. So where do the major websites stack up? Who has the books and records we need to do our research? 

Currently, there is a hot topic in astrophysics concerning the amount of dark matter in the universe. Estimates vary but some believe that up to 80 percent of the mass of the universe is made up of material that scientists cannot directly observe. This unobservable mass is known as dark matter. Well, as genealogists we have our own "dark matter." We have billions of digitized records online and for most genealogists, this vast collection of data goes unobserved. I am frequently mentioning large online collections to fellow researchers who are totally unaware of the existence of these records and books. So it is probably time to write up another summary of these vast online resources. 

The website with the most "dark matter" is the Google Books website. There is no apparent way to determine exactly how many items are digitized on this website, but estimates run to the millions. I can do a search for the term "genealogy," but there are other uses of the term not related to our type of research.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about/history.html

 This history of Google Books from Google only includes information up through 2007. Online estimates of the number of books range from 25 million to over 30 million. The main limitation for genealogists is that the books are divided in availability by copyright restrictions both real and assumed. As with all of these large websites, finding what you are looking for is a major challenge. 

The two websites where I find the most useful books and other items are Archive.org and the HathiTrust.org. Here are the numbers:

• Archive.org -- 12,839,057 and there are 550,000 modern ebooks that can be borrowed with a free archive.org account. 
• HathiTrust.org -- 15,750,409 with 5,898,787 volumes in the public domain. The limitation here is that only those who are part of participating universities and colleges have complete access to the collections. 

FamilySearch.org has 364,088 books in its Books collection. These are all genealogically significant books. Again, there is a limitation in that some of the books are not readily available on the website unless you are in Salt Lake City at the Family History Library or in one of the Family History Centers. These books are in over 130 different languages. 

The idea here is that large eclectic collections of books and other items will inevitably contain many genealogically significant items. 

Of course, there is one really big collection out there, Trove.nla.gov.au, the National Library of Australia with 532,915,906 items. The Europeana.eu website with 53,335,287 items that include artworks, artifacts, books, videos, and sounds from across Europe. The key here is that you can never know what is in these huge websites unless you spend some time getting to know how to search for their contents. The United States is trying to catch up with these large collections through the Digital Public Library of America or DP.LA with a fast growing collection of 16,619,411 items. 

It is time to give a list of links to some of the other larger collections;

• 250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives
• Congregational Library and Archives
• List of digital library projects
• Harvard Library, Library Research Guide for History
• British Library Labs, Digital Collections
• Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Digital Collections
• GrandValley State University, Government Documents: Historic Documents
• Russian Digital Collections

You might remember that nearly every university and college in the United States has its own digital collections. You can always search in every state for such collections. 

I could just keep on listing more and more websites. The point is that there is a lot of "dark matter" missed by genealogists doing online research. 

A Background of Spam

Of course, it is an interesting story about how the name of a can of processed ham became a symbol of junk messages, (see "How the word "Spam" came to mean "junk message") but today, the word spam is almost always associated with unwanted email and comments. As genealogists, if we finally take the plunge and start using computers attached to the internet, we will inevitably be forced to confront the reality of spam.

First of all, there is a difference between spam and bulk email. I often get as many as a hundred emails a day. Many of these could be considered to be bulk email. Similar to the "junk mail" I used to get in quantity every day in my physical mailbox. But in most cases, they are from businesses that I have specifically allowed to send me such email. I may not have any interest today in the offer from a local retailer or an online website, but this background of email keeps me in touch with the world outside my home office. It is easy enough to simply delete the messages that have no immediate interest and look at those that do. I do not consider this to be an imposition. It is just a part of doing business as an online person and usually gives me something to write about almost every day.

So what is spam? First of all the keyword here is "unsolicited." I allow these websites and businesses to send me email, but I do get a lot of comments and emails from people that are not welcome. Now, if I happen to be driving down the local freeway, I am going to see a lot of billboards. I did not ask to see these billboards and technically, I do not have to look at them. But I do see them and I do look at them, depending on the traffic flow. Are billboards "spam?" Hmm. What if I see a billboard announcement for a local event that I would like to attend? Is that spam? So, in addition to being unsolicited, spam is also content that we personally are not interested in.

But there is another, more dangerous level of spam. These are people who are, in a real sense, attacking us for illegal, immoral or other harmful purposes. The U.S. right now is being deluged with robocalls. A robocall is a telephone call that is unsolicited and originates from a computer program that systematically calls every conceivable telephone number. Some of these calls come from "legitimate" businesses. But others come from people who are trying to defraud the recipients of the calls. The solution is to have caller ID and do not answer unidentified phone calls. If you do get a call that is unsolicited, just hang up. Do not talk, do not reason with the person, do not yell or complain, just hang up.

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/signin?return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fconsumercomplaints.fcc.gov%2Fhc%2Fen-us%2Farticles%2F202873880-Rules-and-Resources-for-Dealing-with-Unwanted-Calls-and-Texts

Hmm. Here is a screenshot of the Federal Communications Commission website. Guess what? They want you to register. What happens when you register? If you permit them to do so, they will send you more email.

Here are some simple rules for avoiding almost all of the problems we have today with spam in all its forms.

1. If you receive an unsolicited comment or email, do not open it or respond or reply. Just delete the comment or email. My email program, Gmail, gives me a short summary of the content of any email message I recieve. I can quickly scan the list of emails and delete any of those I choose not to read or do not recognize as important.

2. If you have a blog or other online presence, take the time to review any comments before allowing them to be posted. All of the blog programs, such as Blogger, will allow you to review comments before they are posted. Do this.

3. Set up the filters on your email and other content. See these websites for information and instructions:

• Wikipedia: Email filtering
• Create rules to filter your emails on Google Help
• How to set up email filters in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook

You can find similar instructions for the program you are using to read your email by searching online.

New Additions to ScotlandsPeople

The ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk website is the official Scottish Government site for searching government records and archives. Quoting from the website:

The ScotlandsPeople site is maintained by the National Records of Scotland, a non-ministerial department of the Scottish Government. Our purpose is to collect, preserve and produce information about Scotland's people and history and make it available to inform current and future generations. We were established on 1 April 2011, following the merger of the General Register Office for Scotland and the National Archives of Scotland.

The website is set up to work as a pay-per-view site and uses a system of "credits" sold in batches of 30 or 40. The price per credit drops with the purchase of larger quantities of credits. You can see the current cost on the "Buy Credits" page of the website. The exchange rate as of the date of this post was 1.29 U.S. Dollars to the Pound.

Recently, the website added more than 36,000 new baptism, marriage and death records from Presbyterian churches, 1744 – 1855. You can search the website for free. If you need to learn the basics of Scottish research, please see my recent webinar now on the Brigham Young University Family History Library YouTube Channel. 

Beginning Scottish Research - James Tanner

Putting Your Sundial in the Shade

Today we were briefly visiting a neighbor's home and I saw a very nice sundial that was sitting in the deep shade of a tree and a large bush. I am certain that this neighbor has simply not given any thought to the use of the sundial other than as a decorative garden object. How many of us as genealogists ignore the benefits of our modern technology in the same fashion? We use our tablets and computers for trivial (in the shade) uses when they are designed for intensive use in a very technical way.

Computers in all their iterations are general tools. By contrast, a sundial is a very specialized, single-use tool. It tells the approximate time of day when the sun is shining and assuming it is properly oriented to true north at noonday. See "How to set up a horizontal sundial." If you were to read this linked article you would find out that even though sundials are single-use tools, they are fairly complicated. Computers, on the other hand, as general use tools are almost infinitely complicated. For example, I am writing this blog post on my computer while listening to music and interrupting my writing to do research on the topic of the blog. Another example is my use of the iPhone (another general use computer). In the course of a typical day, I will normally use between twenty and thirty different apps (programs).

Granted, I am far from the "average" computer user. But I am constantly finding new ways to work with these marvelous tools. I am also constantly looking at new or updated programs, trying to see if they will improve the way I do my research. I keep coming back to this theme because of its impact and importance to advancing genealogical research out of the 19th Century.

In the near future, I plan to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. I will write about some of my impressions concerning the issue of using computers as generalized tools and taking advantage of the things they do best.

What is a Digital Genealogical Workflow? Part One

Most genealogists I have worked with over the past few years have fragmented workflow, moving between paper records and notes and online family trees and digitized documents. I still see many people with a pad and pencil or pen diligently copying information off of a computer screen. This past week, I had a friend who was showing me a huge pile of paper notes and family group records while we were trying to compare the notes and records to what was already on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. We all seem to be caught between paper and computers.

Now with the imminent demise of microfilm, we are moving even more decisively into a digital world. So how are we to approach this new completely digital and online world? How do digital documents really affect the way genealogists have worked for years? How do we adapt to these changes or more directly do we adapt to these changes? This is really a subject of ongoing interest to everyone involved in the larger genealogical community even if they are still paper-bound and I have to keep coming back to this topic as the genealogical world continues to change rather rapidly.

For me, the decisive moment came many years ago when I threw out my two-foot high pile of paper family group records after converting all the information into digital format. The transition took several years, but after spending those years entering thousands of records into a series of computers and computer programs, I finally had no real need to go back to the paper. I have to admit that I still keep a pile of note paper on my desk and I do write myself handwritten notes from time to time and keep a few handwritten lists, but nearly everything else I do is digital and online.

How will the recent FamilySearch decision to retire microfilm as a media for genealogical records affect our research process? Well, that depends on the individual genealogist's involvement with research. I have been recently compiling a list of research items from Rhode Island records that need to be reviewed in conjunction with my Tanner line research. Because of the imminent microfilm issue, I have to rethink the process.

I basically sort the records I need into different categories.

• Those records that are readily available online in digital format
• Those records that are presently only available on microfilm but may be available in digital format
• Those records that are only available on microfilm and are unlikely to become available digitally
• Those records that are still on paper i.e. printed books and manuscripts.

The digital records are really no problem. I can access them anytime. The paper records are sitting in libraries and ultimately, I could use Interlibrary Loan to access those that do not happen to be available locally including the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The major issue is access to the microfilm copies. I have been ordering a pile of microfilms ever since I started at the Brigham Young University Family History Library, but now we are in overdrive ordering the films that I think I might need in the near future. 

One thing that is becoming evident is that many of the microfilmed records listed by the FamilySearch.org Catalog are actually available in digitized format from other sources. A fairly high percentage of the microfilms turn out to be old records that are available in digital copies on Archive.org or the HathiTrust.org. In fact, on both these websites, I have been finding amazingly valuable material that is not in the FamilySearch.org Catalog. I am also finding a lot of valuable information that is on other websites. There are still some core records that seem to be only available in microfilmed copies at the Family History Library, but those may not be crucial to my research. 

I will be able to acquire some of the microfilm-only records before the cutoff date for requesting microfilm from Salt Lake but after that date, I will have to do even more online searching for specific classes of records. I am still not ruling out a trip to Rhode Island to search the records in the local repositories directly. 

So, for the present, my main research activity consists of moving as much of what I am interested in researching into the "digital pile," that is, those records that are available online that I need to search. On the other hand, when I identify records that are only available on microfilm or paper and will remain that way for a while (or forever) I am listing those for visits to Salt Lake or other parts of the country. 

Stay tuned, I am not done yet with this analysis and probably will never be. 

First Look at RootsMagic Link to Ancestry.com

RootsMagic.com has announced and made available their long awaited link to Ancestry.com. The link is in Version 7.5.0.0 available as a free upgrade.

The hints from Ancestry.com show up as a green dot in the little light bulbs. RootsMagic.com now has connections to FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com, and MyHeritage.com.

You can see that you could spend a considerable amount of time processing the record hints from all three of these programs. RootsMagic.com has provided a quick start guide to the Ancestry.com connection as a PDF file.

http://files.rootsmagic.com/guides/Magic_Guide_TreeShare_Ancestry_FAQ.pdf

In a real sense, RootsMagic.com has now become a way to have a central "clearing house" for our genealogy, whether or not it ends up on FamilySearch.org or one of the other websites.